In a new video just up on the NY Times' "Paper Cuts" book blog, editor Sam Tanenhaus talks with Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison about her new book, A Mercy, and President-elect Barack Obama. Morrison compliments Obama's facility as a writer — "the beauty of his language," as she calls it — and ruminates on Obama's electoral success earlier this month. "I am a devoted, rabid supporter of his," she tells Tanenhaus. "This is curious, this moment, partly because... so much has been damaged and partly because old divisions, old divisions have surfaced again, and they're almost just as violent. It's not the majority of what's going on in this country, which is why I think, this election, this movement, this brave, in a sense, it's like a reclamation of the promise of what America believed about itself." [NY Times]